April 2014

More than 1.5 billion people today reside in countries affected by violence and conflict, most - if not all - of which also suffer from inadequate and poor access to basic services. By 2030, it is estimated that about 40 percent of the world’s poor will be living in such environments, where each consecutive year of organized violence will continue to slow down poverty reduction by nearly one percentage point.

A large portion of this group presently resides in conflict-affected parts of South Asia, a region that is home to 24 percent of the world’s population and about half the world’s poor.

Despite such challenging circumstances, research shows that in many settings, development aid is indeed working - albeit with frustrating inconsistency.

The 2011 World Development Report recognizes the strong link between security and development outcomes in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. However, what the evidence is yet to show us is how exactly do you get the job done right?

What happens when the fox takes over the chicken coop? Or to put it in another context, what can you do when those meant to be responsible for running a country’s economy turn it into their own personal enterprise, particularly when such take-over is carried out by formally legal - but de facto illegitimate - rules and regulations?

Above, watch the trailer for "Years of Living Dangerously" and the panel discussion with Thomas Friedman during the 2014 Spring Meetings. Below, watch the premiere episode.

Fueled by warmer temperatures and added moisture in the air, a storm system coils like a snake ready to strike. Rising seas stand poised to obliterate shoreline developments and cityscapes. The brown, dry soil of once-verdant farmland threatens food security for millions, all while the number of mouths to feed grows. Wildfires rage and burning peat lands belch black carbon and greenhouse gases into our thin shell of an atmosphere.

And that’s how climate change is affecting real people, right now, all over the globe. “Years of Living Dangerously” on SHOWTIME® features an exceptional cast of world-class journalists and celebrity reporters documenting the impact of climate change worldwide. Over nine episodes, we show that climate change is 100% a people story.

World leaders just affirmed the latest in a series of reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Nobel Prize-winning authority on climate science. These reports are uncompromising in their assessment that climate change is real, it’s us, it's now, it's getting worse, and we’re not prepared. The latest report makes clear we have the clean energy technologies to start slashing carbon pollution at very low cost, much lower than the cost of inaction – but the window to act is closing fast.

These are the years of living dangerously. But they are also years of hope. We are the first generation to know that climate change is a clear and present danger, and also the last generation that can stop it. World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim often describes a vision of young children in the future, turning back to their fathers and asking, "Dad, what did you do when you knew?"

Fifteen years ago, the international community designed the Millennium Development Goals, including that of halving extreme poverty, through a process that mostly took place in New York, behind closed doors. A few years earlier, the World Bank had developed the guidelines of the Poverty Reduction Strategy for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries from Washington, D.C. in a similar fashion.

Fortunately, this approach has changed.

Today, the process of identifying and consulting on the post-2015 development agenda has been opened to the general public including, importantly, those whom the goals are expected to serve. In fact, the United Nations and other partners have undertaken a campaign to reach out directly to citizens for ideas and feedback on the issues most important to them in the post-2015 agenda. Those who are formulating the post-2015 goals will no longer need to assume what the poor and vulnerable want: they will have a firsthand knowledge of what their priorities are.

The World Bank Group has explicitly stated that our new goals of eradicating extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity cannot be achieved without institutions, structures, and processes that empower local communities, hold governments accountable, and ensure that all groups in society are able to participate in decision-making processes. In other words, these goals will not be within reach without a social contract between a country and its citizens that reduces imbalances in voice, participation and power between different groups, including the poor.

Imagine you are a development practitioner in a country just coming out of conflict and you have just been put in charge of designing a community driven development (CDD) operation there.

After decades of war, you are faced with a country that has crumbling infrastructure, extremely high unemployment rates, weak local governance systems, perhaps even a vast population internally displaced or worse still, exposed to violence. Where do you begin fixing the problem? What would you prioritize? Do you begin by rebuilding and providing public goods, and hope that it would eventually re-establish the broken trust between the state and its people? Or do you directly tackle trust building first? Or perhaps you could do them simultaneously, but how would you go about doing that?

Philippe Aghion, Harvard economics professor and director of Industrial Organization at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) delivered a lecture at the Bank on April 17 on 'What do we Learn from Shumpeterian Growth Theory?'

It was interesting to hear from the co-founder of the Shumpeterian paradigm about the relationship between economic growth, innovation, creative destruction, and competition. Aghion’s approach is to examine how various factors interact with local entrepreneurs’ incentives to either innovate or to imitate frontier technologies.

It may not always be called ‘radio’ anymore, but audio communication is not only alive and well – it’s an increasingly vital method to reach diverse audiences. It’s everywhere—online and on-air, on your mobile phone, and your iPad. You can listen to audio while driving, working, puttering around the house, or taking a walk outdoors. It allows listeners to multi-task, which is critical in today’s fast-paced world.

That’s why we’re so excited to launch our own new World Bank Group channel on SoundCloud, a fast-growing international web platform with more than 300 million users. Many describe SoundCloud as the “YouTube of audio” with millions of audio files that are routinely linked on blogs, websites, and social media. Even President Obama shares his speeches on SoundCloud.

"Management is not an intellectually satisfying occupation. It consists of telling people things that you’re not sure about and they don’t want to hear.”

- Andrew Smithers, Chairman and Founder of Smithers & Co., a leading advisor to investment managers on international asset allocation. He has contributed regularly to London Evening Standard, Sentaku Magazine and Nikkei Veritas, and he is the author of several books concerning investment, including his most recent, The Road to Recovery: How and Why Economic Policy Must Change (2013).

What do Simeon Marcelo of the Philippines, Santosh Hegde of India, KPK of Indonesia. ACC of Bhutan and ACRC of South Korea have in common? All of them are anti-corruption super heroes (click on the hyperlinks to read their stories) and beacons of hope for all people against corruption. Corrupt officials are terrified of them and they all have served independent ombudsman/anti-corruption agency functions in their country. Over the years I have admired the courageous, professional and dedicated work of these individuals and organizations and had first hand experience of visiting and working with some of them. Based on this I can confidently say that Ombudsman can and do fight corruption successfully when they have the enabling environment and leadership (later I comment on what the success factors are in my view).